Pricing · বাংলা
Bengali speech data: what it costs
Per-hour cost bands for Bengali speech data collection, why 5 dialect varieties change the number, and worked budgets at three common volumes.
- Language
- Bengali (bn-IN)
- Rate band
- ₹3,200 – ₹6,500 / hour
- Speakers
- 97M
- Studio cities
- 5
Why Bengali prices the way it does
Bengali has roughly 97 million speakers concentrated in West Bengal, Tripura, Assam (Barak Valley), which sets how quickly a cohort can be recruited. Recruitment speed, not recording time, is the dominant cost in almost every programme.
Tag every speaker as Indian Bengali and record district of origin; mixing in Bangladeshi speech without tags is a common and costly dataset defect.
- Kolkata professional speech mixes English heavily; rural West Bengal much less. A single 'Bengali' dataset without register tags conflates two very different acoustic and lexical distributions.
- Indian Bengali is under-collected relative to Bangladeshi Bengali, and North Bengal and Tripura varieties are almost entirely missing.
Worked budgets
| Volume | Typical speakers | Indicative range | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 hours | 200 at 30 min | ₹3,20,000 – ₹6,50,000 | 3-6 weeks |
| 500 hours | 1,000 at 30 min | ₹14,72,000 – ₹29,90,000 | 6-10 weeks |
| 1,000 hours | 2,000 at 30 min | ₹27,20,000 – ₹55,25,000 | 10-16 weeks |
Unit rates fall with volume because setup, script design and recruiter onboarding are amortised, not because quality is relaxed.
Cost drivers specific to this language
- Dialect spread: covering Kolkata standard (Rarhi), Sylheti-influenced, Rangpuri / North Bengal, Medinipuri rather than one prestige variety adds recruitment cost but is what makes the corpus usable in production
- Script and transcription: Bengali transcription needs native reviewers, and Three sibilant characters chosen inconsistently for the same sound is the usual source of rework
- Phonetics: Inherent vowel is realised as /ɔ/ or /o/, which breaks G2P rules copied from Devanagari-based systems, which requires reviewers trained on the language rather than generic annotators
Add-ons and their pricing
| Layer | Unit | Indicative |
|---|---|---|
| Verbatim transcription | per audio hour | ₹900 – ₹2,400 |
| Speaker diarisation and turn labels | per audio hour | ₹600 – ₹1,500 |
| Event and noise tagging | per audio hour | ₹400 – ₹1,100 |
| Romanised parallel transcript | per audio hour | ₹500 – ₹1,200 |
| Speaker-disjoint train/dev/test splits | one-off | Included |
How to get the number down without hurting the model
- Widen the age bands before you widen the dialect spread — dialect coverage is what determines production accuracy
- Use quiet-room capture where deployment audio is not studio-clean anyway
- Order transcription in a second phase once the audio passes acceptance
- Run a 10-20 hour pilot; specification errors caught there are the cheapest ones you will ever fix
Frequently asked
What is the per-hour rate for Bengali speech data?
Indicatively ₹3,200 to ₹6,500 per delivered hour for standard scripted or spontaneous capture with verbatim transcription. Narrow cohorts and studio-only capture sit at the top of that band.
Is Bengali more expensive than Hindi?
No — it sits in the same tier as Hindi, because the recruitment pool is deep enough to fill cohorts quickly in multiple cities.
Do you quote in INR or USD?
Either. Bands here are in INR; international clients are usually invoiced in USD at a fixed contract rate.
What is included in the quoted rate?
Recruitment, consent capture, recording, QA, transcription if ordered, metadata, delivery packaging and a perpetual licence with full IP transfer.
Related pages
Price a Bengali dataset
Tell us hours, speakers and dialect spread for Bengali and you get a fixed price against it.